"We could be heroes, if just for one day..."

So I have this book on Alan Moore. It is a long interview by George Khoury which serves as an inside view to his works and life. It's like a biography basically, but done in the form of an interview.

It's my bathroom reading, and so while meandering through the book I stumbled upon this section where he is discussing his most influential and important work, Watchmen, and in particular the characters Sally Jupiter and the Comedian and the conundrum they bring up on the issue of love. If you have not seen the movie or read the book (first of all, who are you, and why are you reading my blog, because how can we be friends) Sally Jupiter is Silk Spectre I. She was a superhero in World War II era 1940s along with the Comedian in a superhero group called the Minutemen. He makes sexual advances towards her, she refuses, they get in a small brawl (they are superheroes, they both now how to fight) and then he tries to rape her but some fellow Minutemen come to see if she is ready to go out and they beat the snot out of him. Time goes on and they eventually make "the two backed beast" consensually and she has her daughter from him. Throughout the Watchmen story she is mourning the death of the Comedian because she loved him. They were talking about how she seemingly does not understand why she loved him, just that she did and how sometimes in life we do things without knowing why "other than the fact that we feel we've got to".

From this George Khoury starts a great tangent on superheroes that blew my mind. So inspired by Adam's intellectual blogposts on the notion of competition (which kudos to Mr. Robertson on the best blogposts I have ever read), I wanted to share something that I thought had some weight to it. Something that hopefully may make you think and do something awesome during your day and escape the doldrums of ordinary existence. Or if nothing else inspire you to go read or watch Watchmen. (Though the read is by far the more rewarding and enriching experience.)

[The following is quoted without permission from The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore - Indispensable Edition by George Khoury and friends]



GK: That seems to be something that people don't understand about super-heroes -- there is no perfection, you know? You can't be Superman unless you want to.

AM: Well I think being Superman -- I mean to even be a superior being -- it's not actually to do with having powers or to believe. You've already got powers. All of us have incredible abilities, talents, things that can achieve miraculous things. Most of us, yeah, we've got all of these superpowers and we never do anything; we sit down on the sofa and watch TV, and drink beer and zone out -- and I suppose that if we had got telepathy or super-breath or the power of flight or invulnerability, we'd probably still sit on the sofa and watch TV and drink beer. It's like, most people, it wouldn't matter whether they did rescue a dying alien, jet rocketing here with babies from an exploding planet, or find the magic flying ring or whatever, it wouldn't matter, because it's not heroism or super-heroism or just simply being a decent person. It's nothing to do with gaining special powers to do this with.

If you are a fully aware and awake human being, you will see the quite marvelous powers that you, as an ordinary human being, already have at your disposal. And you'll see how you are using those powers or not using them. Now, I mean, there's plenty of people on this planet -- I mean, in terms of what they could accomplish -- how much below the fictional Superman does, say, Bill Gates rate? Bill Gates has this superpower of immense wealth. Now, you've got that much money, am I right in thinking that you could probably pretty much do anything?

Sure.

And Bill Gates is not the only sort of fantastically rich person on the face of the planet, so these are people who have superpowers. When have they saved the world, ended hunger, done magnificent, massive gestures -- did they ever even save a snoopy girl reporter from falling out of a window? They didn't. We have people with superpowers on this planet and they're not necessarily superior people. On the other hand we have some people on this planet who would seem to be completely disadvantaged and not have anything going for them and yet they've accomplished fantastic acts.

I'd like people to actually think about, what does heroism mean? What is power? What are super-powers? Does Stephen Hawking have a super-power? I mean, he would seem to me upon the available evidnce to be much smarter than, say, Superman or Braniac 5. He completely outstrips every comic-book genius. And he's even in a wheelcair, so he could join the X-Men or the Doom Patrol, or any of those kind of -- differently-abled friendly super outfits.

The super-powers don't really matter at the end of the day, it's the characters that are important. Just as it doesn't really matter whether me or you or the reader ever gain the ability to run faster than light and get a neat costume. That won't make any difference to us. If we're an asshole now, all we will be then is an asshole in a neat costume who can run faster than light. This is not going to really improve the universe any, you know? The important thing is that ordinary human beings are fantastic. They are fantastic in what they can do and what they can be. They can do fantastic things to their world for good or ill. They don't need powers. They don't need outfits and chest insignia. With things like Watchmen and a lot of my subsequent work I've tried to sort of suggest that. That having superpowers wouldn't necessarily make you a nice person and that ordinary human beings are what we've go to work with; we don't have any superheroes here.

So live your life.

Live your life, and that's heroism. Live your life, try and do the right thing. Try and be the best person that you can be. That is heroism. That is super-heroism. Don't hang around waiting, standing, near a big rack of chemicals waiting for the lightning bolt, because that's not going to happen. And if it did, it wouldn't make any difference; you wouldn't be any happier. In fact you'd probably be electrocuted and dead. That's my guess anyway.